{"id":747,"date":"2017-06-17T18:16:46","date_gmt":"2017-06-17T22:16:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=747"},"modified":"2017-06-18T23:07:29","modified_gmt":"2017-06-19T03:07:29","slug":"uncle-vanya-meets-porgy-and-bess","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2017\/06\/uncle-vanya-meets-porgy-and-bess.html","title":{"rendered":"Uncle Vanya Meets Porgy and Bess"},"content":{"rendered":"

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What did the legendary Russian experimental theater director Yevgeny Vakhtangov (1883-1922) have in common with Porgy and<\/em> Bess, Oklahoma!<\/em>, and Carousel?<\/em> The immigrant director of these landmark Broadway productions, Rouben Mamoulian, was to some degree a Vakhtangov disciple.<\/p>\n

Mamoulian took Broadway by storm in 1927 with his staging of Dubose Heyward\u2019s novel Porgy.<\/em> At the age of 30, he was an overnight star, an apostle of radically integrated musical theater imposed by a singular directorial vision. Mamoulian\u2019s fame drove him to Hollywood, where he \u00a0hired Richard Rodgers to through-compose music for Love Me Tonight<\/em> (1932) \u2013 a supreme musical film that subverts and surpasses Ernst\u2019s Lubitsch\u2019s film musicals. It may be plausibly inferred that Mamoulian introduced Rodgers to the strategies and ideals that would make Oklahoma!<\/em> and Carousel<\/em> Broadway break-throughs. In short: Mamoulian is a forgotten hero of American musical theater \u2013 and the influence of Russian experimental theater on mainstream Broadway is a story even more forgotten.<\/p>\n

I became aware of the magnitude of Mamoulian when writing Artists in Exile<\/a>: How Refugees from European War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts <\/em>(2008). Subsequently, I plundered the Mamoulian Archive at the Library of Congress and discovered that Mamoulian\u2019s impact on Porgy and Bess<\/em> was more fundamental than anyone had imagined. He single-handedly turned Heyward\u2019s novel into a musical redemption drama (Porgy<\/em> the play was already full of singing) eschewing Heyward\u2019s efforts to \u201cauthentically\u201d represent the African-American Gullahs of Charleston\u2019s Catfish Row. (I reported these findings in “On My Way” <\/a>— The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess.”)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

How indebted was Mamoulian to Vakhtangov? It\u2019s an elusive topic because Mamoulian preferred to present himself to Americans as a self-created genius. And yet descriptions of the Vakhtangov studio \u2013 of which Mamoulian was part sometime during his Moscow years 1915-1918 \u2013 fit the Mamoulian mold. Vakhtangov was a Stanislavski disciple who rejected Stanislavski\u2019s verisimilitude. Rather, he espoused \u00a0\u201cfantastic realism\u201d wedded to \u201ctotal theater.\u201d Like Stanislavski, he cultivated an aesthetically bonded community of actors. Unlike Stanislavski, he was obsessed with choreographing sound and music \u2013 with rhythm and tempo. His detractors complained of a surfeit of detail, of elaborate artifice and a failure to project interior feeling. All of this fits Mamoulian \u2013 especially his hyper-ambitious\u00a0Porgy<\/em> and Porgy<\/em> and Bess<\/em> productions, preceding a long and erratic decline accelerated by the influence of Hollywood and a bad marriage.<\/p>\n

A century later, Moscow\u2019s Vakhtangov Theater endures. Rimas Tuminas, its Lithuanian artistic director since 2007, is today a reckonable force in Russian theater. His award-winning Vakhtangov production of Chekhov\u2019s Uncle Vanya,<\/em> first given in Moscow in 2009, is currently enjoying a short run at New York\u2019s City Center. To what degree Tuminas\u2019s Vakhtangov Theatre retains the imprint of Yevgeny Vakhtangov I have no idea. But this Vanya<\/em> seems to fit the bill. It rejects verisimilitude. It embraces total theater and a consuming directorial vision (what we today call Regietheatre). And, most strikingly, it integrates music more pervasively than any production I have ever encountered of a classic play.<\/p>\n

In fact, a musical score composed by Fautus Latenas is a constant ingredient. Latenas has supplied a series of minimalist mood vignettes, each a short refrain incessantly repeated. The volume is usually low, but there are also crescendos and climaxes aligned with Chekhov\u2019s text. This could be a recipe for kitsch if the score were deployed to underpin the mood on stage. But that mood is polyvalent, and more often than not the musical component is ironic. Sonia\u2019s excrutiating scene with Dr. Astrov, for instance, is played to a tart waltz.<\/p>\n

In a useful interview in the City Center program book, Tuminas says:<\/p>\n

\u201cChekhov looked at people\u2019s desire to be happy and thought, \u2018My god, you are so funny! You daydream and expect happiness, knowing full well that it\u2019s impossible!\u2019 He sees all these poor, holy crearures who want something and are reaching for something even though there\u2019s nothing up ahead, and it makes him smile a kind, forgiving smile. That\u2019s probably why there\u2019s so much humor in his plays. It\u2019s deeply hidden, but if we can grasp it, perhaps we\u2019ll understand something important about our own lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

I would not call the humor in Tuminas\u2019s Uncle Vanya \u201cdeeply hidden.\u201d Sergey Makovetskiy, who plays Vanya (in the photo above), is virtuoso mime. Limping and disheveled, ill-attuned to life\u2019s requirements, he projects the pathos of a W. C. Fields or Buster Keaton. A reading more distant from Michael Redgrave\u2019s famous English-language Vanya is scarcely imaginable. At the play\u2019s beginning, the news of the Professor\u2019s arrival animates Vanya hilariously. The pompous formality of the entrance itself, accompanied by a fawning retinue, equally invites laughter. But this tone is not sustained. The contradictory vectors dialectically at play \u2013 humor vs. \u00a0pathos, music vs. action, attraction vs. repulsion among the variegated dramatis personae of the Serebryakov estate \u2013 are at all times exquisitely\u00a0 unpredictable.<\/p>\n

The Professor himself is cast against type. Vladimir Siminov is a big, robust actor whose credits include Othello and Pushkin\u2019s Boris Godunov. His Aleksandr Vladimirovich is surprisingly libidinous but sufficiently preposterous. Sonya, Maria Berdinskikh, is a gamin. Neither she nor Makovetskiy\u2019s Vanya could credibly run a rural Russian estate.<\/p>\n

The elusive affect of this production is not the concentrated bittersweet aura we know as \u201cChekhov\u201d \u2013 and whose aching vacancy is supported by silence, not music. I thought the use of the Hebrew prayer \u201cKol nidre\u201d (played by a solo trumpet) as a type of theme-song was a miscalculation \u2013 it does not invite submissive repetition under the dialogue. Otherwise, I found the production engaging at one or another level at every unforeseen twist and turn.<\/p>\n

In Rouben Mamoulian\u2019s 1935 Porgy and Bess<\/em>, \u201cI got plenty o\u2019 nuttin\u2019\u201d was accompanied by a set of empty rocking chairs moving to and fro in time with Porgy\u2019s song, as were the needles of women sewing. In Tuminas\u2019s Uncle Vanya<\/em>, pre-recorded musical cues precisely dictate the timing of a spoken phrase. What any of this may have to do with the legacy of Yevgeny Vakhtangov remains a tantalizing question.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What did the legendary Russian experimental theater director Yevgeny Vakhtangov (1883-1922) have in common with Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma!, and Carousel? The immigrant director of these landmark Broadway productions, Rouben Mamoulian, was to some degree a Vakhtangov disciple. Mamoulian took Broadway by storm in 1927 with his staging of Dubose Heyward\u2019s novel Porgy. At the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-747","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-c3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":752,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions\/752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}